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From Cable Star to Face in the Crowd

Winter 2002. Ashleigh Banfield is in Ramallah, the West Bank, interviewing Yasir Arafat. At 34, she is the anchor of her own prime-time program on MSNBC, the cable news network owned by NBC and Microsoft.

Spring 2003. Ashleigh Banfield is on Tennessee State Route 374, interviewing people at a sparsely attended Saturday afternoon support-the-troops rally 6,700 miles away from the action in Iraq. She is just another NBC News correspondent fighting for face time.

Ms. Banfield, so recently promoted as one of cable news's most promising young stars, has faded into the back bench of NBC News, a sudden change that has surprised people throughout the industry.

To some at NBC, her story is a cautionary tale in the increasingly competitive television news business. She is a victim, these people said, of MSNBC's constant attempts at reinvention as it tries to pull out of third place in the cable news ratings, behind Fox News Channel and CNN. They said MSNBC, desperate for attractive and vibrant personalities who connect with viewers, thought it had found one in Ms. Banfield, and then pushed her along too quickly, only to hastily abandon her when the ratings waned. But to others, it is a story of how the promising young star too readily believed the hype MSNBC built around her, and did not do enough to build the relationships. In the process, several people at NBC said, Ms. Banfield alienated bosses and colleagues, including Katie Couric, an anchor of ''Today,'' and had few supporters when her program languished in the ratings.

In the latest example, she angered top NBC management April 25 by giving a speech that it believed was critical of its war coverage. NBC News publicly rebuked Ms. Banfield, whose contract runs out early next year.

Neal Shapiro, the NBC News president, would not comment on whether her contract would be renewed, and several people at NBC said it appeared no decision had been made. But, Mr. Shapiro said, Ms. Banfield's reduced visibility was solely because of her new role as an NBC News correspondent, a job he gave her late last year after canceling her MSNBC program, ''On Location.'' As such, she is being asked to prove herself all over again in broadcast news.

''It's one thing to be a rising star in cable,'' Mr. Shapiro said. ''The broadcast network is a different platform with different skills required.''

Ms. Banfield acknowledged her disappointment. ''To go from having so much work to do every day to doing sort of sporadic appearances, it is a little shocking,'' she said. ''I'm getting the same opportunities as other correspondents -- I'm sort of the newbie -- so in that respect I'm happy.''

Ms. Banfield was just what MSNBC was looking for when it hired her in early 2000. At the time, she was an anchor at KDFW, the Fox station in Dallas, where she had won an Emmy for a report on a murder case. She was also known in the city's gossip pages for singing in a rock band and for holding late-night parties at her loft apartment.

''She's energetic, she's vivacious, she's intelligent and she made an impact with viewers,'' said Bruce Smith, one of her producers at KDFW. ''Because she did make such an impact with viewers, maybe that's why people sought her out and wrote about her.''

Ms. Banfield, though somewhat informal in her delivery, fit nicely with MSNBC's positioning as the news network of choice for younger viewers. Executives later admitted they also liked her frosted blond hair and trademark Clark Kent-style glasses.

Just a few months after arriving at the network, she won raves from television critics for her coverage of the 2000 presidential election dispute. She approached it with a chatty style that MSNBC portrayed as a new journalistic approach. Awaiting a teleconference between Al Gore and Democratic leaders in late November, she told her viewers the last time she was that excited about a telephone call, ''I was waiting for my prom date to call.'' The New York Post called her a potential successor to Katie Couric shortly afterward.

Television critics also hailed her after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She rushed to the scene before the second World Trade Center tower fell in Lower Manhattan, and she stayed there all day, covered in ash.

After going to Islamabad to cover the fighting in Afghanistan in late September 2001, she was ridiculed by some in the news media for dying her hair a severe shade of brown, to blend better into the Arab world. But as the third-place network, MSNBC seemed to like the attention.

When MSNBC decided to give Ms. Banfield her own program from the region, some producers at the network privately said they worried that she was not ready to anchor her own program, even it if was drawing audiences of nearly a million people -- a fair size for cable.

As she moved around the Middle East through the winter, some at NBC referred to her reports as ''performance art,'' criticizing them as little more than Ms. Banfield in front of a camera at some new locale. But she also earned grudging respect from NBC News hard-liners. When a group of NBC staff members in New York poked fun at her for delivering a report with heavy dramatic flair one night, they were scolded by Tom Brokaw, the anchor of the ''NBC Nightly News.'' He reminded them they were in a comfortable studio while she was out in the danger zone, according to two people with knowledge of the incident.

By last fall, Ms. Banfield's audience had fallen to 230,000 people, and she was clearly exhausted from all the travel. Mr. Shapiro abruptly canceled her program in October and moved her over to NBC News's broadcast division. Some saw it as an example of fickleness at the network. ''They just fell in love with a new toy and they played with it and played with it and played with it until the paint came off,'' said one longtime NBC News correspondent.

But Ms. Banfield did not have many such defenders when the cancellation notice came. She had a reputation among some crew members as being too difficult to work with.

''I'm not going to sit here and say I'm an angel,'' she said in an interview on Friday. ''I'm a tough person and I work extremely hard and I'm really demanding.''

Ms. Banfield also had her problems with Ms. Couric and the staff of ''Today.'' During the 2000 Olympics she angered the program's crew when she showed up at their set in Sydney, Australia, to interview the runner Michael Johnson after Ms. Couric, who had gotten him to give NBC an exclusive interview, was finished. One person who was there said Ms. Banfield broke ''Today's'' promise to Mr. Johnson and asked him about an Olympic steroid controversy. Ms. Banfield said she was told to do so by producers of ''NBC Nightly News.'' But resentment remained.

In another, more recent incident, Ms. Banfield was accused by Washington, D.C., parking officials of making an obscene gesture after they asked her and her producer to move their vehicle. The story got back to top executives at NBC News, who considered it an example of lack of decorum. She said she was gesturing to her producer.

Mr. Shapiro said that Ms. Banfield's diminished presence on television was not punishment for what he considered inner-office politics. Rather, he said, the style that served her so well in cable, where correspondents often report live from a scene, does not work in broadcast news, and he is giving her a chance to prove herself in the major leagues.

Her April 25 speech, at Kansas State University, was considered a major setback. Ms. Banfield argued that for all their journalistic coups, the United States television networks had failed to show all of war's horror.

''It wasn't journalism,'' she said, because ''getting access does not mean you're getting the story. It just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story.''

The statement deeply offended many at NBC News. Ms. Banfield said she was ''so proud'' of her colleagues at the network and regretted her remarks, which she said were taken out of context by several news outlets. As for her future, Ms. Banfield seems to be leaving her options open. ''I don't want to lock myself into something that isn't marketable any longer,'' she said. ''I want to keep my mind open to all of the opportunities that exist in television. Who knows where this business is going? Who knows what sorts of shows are going to be out there?''

But she is clearly still aiming high. ''To rise through the ranks of Katie Couric and Jane Pauley and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer you've got to put up with a lot of hardship,'' she said. ''I'm just 15 years into it, I still feel like a kid who has a lot to learn, and I'm trying.''